Option to: Allow Poweramp to read a single .cue file per song for the metadata

[holub97]

Hello! I have some songs that do not have any metadata, and in the PC (with Musicbee) i use .cue files to add the information (artist, album, year, track title, number, etc). I could add the tags with something like mp3tag but that would create some other problems for me (regarding preservation "In Natura", file sharing, md5, etc) - and its easier to manage with .cue files.
What songs? Generally drm-free remixes, remasters and edits of game songs made by small artists - normally in large filesizes (wav/flac) - and commonly they have this nature (of being a large file with no metadata).
Also some very small/experimental artists releases songs like this (and don't release in any music plataform).
So the request is some option for Poweramp to read and apply these .cue files (by default make this option "OFF" to keep the "normal" program behaviour because i know most of the time, single .cue files are not wanted/create redundancy).
I guess it is a weird ask. But thank you for the program, for the features and for reading this post.

Extra questions:
- If i have, for example, 30 songs in a folder, all without metadata, and create a single .cue file listing them all (and putting metadata info), will Poweramp read the file? (for reference, MusicBee does not seem to work with this configuration of .cue file; You need one for each song - in other words, a single "FILE" command per archive).

Other info:
- Android; Samsung Galaxy A03s;
- Premium? Yes.

[andrewilley]

Not tried it (I used metadata) but a single CUE file per each audio file should work.

Andre

[holub97]

Hi!
So, i did a quick (re)test, and it does not seem to work on Poweramp. But i will give details on a specific example (Works in MusicBee) :

File name: apartje - Cheeki Breeki Hardbass Remiks.wav
(yes, the classic, downloaded from the upload made by the man himself)
The cue file:
apartje - Cheeki Breeki Hardbass Remiks.wav.cue (the filename should not mattter)

Content (inside the .cue file):

PERFORMER "apartje."
REM DATE 2015
TITLE "Cheeki Breeki Hardbass Anthem"
FILE "apartje - Cheeki Breeki Hardbass Remiks.wav" WAVE
    TRACK 01 AUDIO
        INDEX 01 00:00:00
        TITLE "apartje - Cheeki Breeki Hardbass Remiks"

 

other info:
- I did a full rescan of the library in the app;
- the .cue file is on the same folder as the .wav file;

[6b6561]

Drop .wav from the name of the .cue file.

[andrewilley]

I've just done some tests, and - presumably to reduce redundancy - Poweramp appears to ignore CUE files which contain just one track index. I assume this is to avoid the sort of issues which I recall from a long time back, where people had got ripped CDs with separate CUE files for each song in an album, a situation which should be handled via tags rather than CUE files.

Of course the official purpose of a CUE file is to split one master audio file into several smaller chunks (normally tracks) for playback purposes, it's not really designed to provide metadata that should be embedded in the audio file. Hence, per the spec, only one FILE command is supported, at the start of the CUE file.

Andre

[holub97]

>6b6561
Ty for the reply, but it does not seem to work. (And, on pc at least, the .cue file name does not matter - only the location and files referenced inside). I do have some other .cue files with their "normal" use (entire album in a single .flac file) and varied names.

>Andrewilley
Thank you for testing and checking this very specific "issue" haha
I found on some other threads and around internet the behaviour of Poweramp being described this way.
So yeah, my feature request/suggestion stands: "Add option to read every .cue file [set default to disabled] or to manually add/force read a .cue file"

Other lil things:
- If anyone know an alternate method to add metadata to a song on an external file AND is accepted by Poweramp, i'm welcome to suggestions (i tried with .m3u and the "extended" arguments, but they only seem to search for something already on the music file - that being said i use a playlist file/.m3u to have the proper play order on one "metadataless" album in Poweramp);
- The only program on PC that could read with no problems a .cue file referencing several files(FILE) was MPC-HC.

[andrewilley]

1) Correct, a CUE file can be named anything.cue. The corresponding audio content is found using the FILE line in the cue file, which looks for a matching file in the local folder.

2) I don't know of another way to provide metadata other than embedding it. If there is no metadata, PA will use the filename for the song Title, and if there are leading or trailing digits in the filename, those will be used as the Track Number.

3) M3U files are not parsed for any title/etc details, all that is used is the storage subfolder location of the audio file. Any displayed info for listed songs is the data that was already in the Library from when the audio file was originally scanned.

A bit more testing later, and it seems that multiple instances of the FILE line are supported, but the same requirement exists that there must be more than one track defined for every valid FILE entry. So if you add a fake "TRACK 02" entry, the songs will become visible. But then of course you've got a ton of spurious songs in the CUE 'folder' which aren't needed.

I created a TEST 1.CUE file:

TITLE "Test Album"
PERFORMER "Test Album Artist"
FILE "Test File 1.mp3" MP3
  TRACK 01 AUDIO
    TITLE "Title One"
    PERFORMER "Artist One"
    INDEX 01 00:00:00
  TRACK 02 AUDIO
    TITLE "Title Two"
    PERFORMER "Artist Two"
    INDEX 01 00:30:00
FILE "Test File 2.mp3" MP3
  TRACK 03 AUDIO
    TITLE "Title Three"
    PERFORMER "Artist Three"
    INDEX 01 00:00:00
  TRACK 04 AUDIO
    TITLE "Title Four"
    PERFORMER "Artist Four"
    INDEX 01 01:00:00

That resulted in a songs pseudo-folder like this, where tracks 1 and 2 are based on the first audio file, and 3 and 4 are played from the second audio file:

So the problem for you is still the restriction of requiring more than one song to be defined for any given audio file. The logic is quite sensible in that if the CUE file just creates one song, why not keep it simple and use the actual MP3 file instead? Your usage case is pretty rare, but as you've described it I can see the case for allowing single-track CUE files, so @maxmp any chance of allowing that in a future version of PA?

Andre